He explained: "Well, [former HBO chairman] Chris Albrecht said, 'You should think about how much longer you want to do this show and we should have an ending.' That was about two or three years before.

"I mean, obviously [the finale] has echoes of the ending of the first season when they were all sitting in the restaurant. Other than that, I can't really say where the idea...it's just an idea."

"I wanted to create a suspenseful sequence," he added. "I didn't want people to be reading into it like The Da Vinci Code. It wasn't meant to confound anybody. It was meant to make you feel, not to make you think, but to make you feel."